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Hey All. At the suggestion of a few people in the Joomla community I decided to site down and write a beginner's guide to optimizing a Joomla site for SEO. The bad news: the default version of Joomla i...

Thanks. Joomla is the best CMS around (IMHO) but its not the best in certain areas. For example, Wordpress is better for SEO and Drupal is better for developers with big ambitions. Hopefully these changes help Joomla catch up to Wordpress a little.

No discussion of SEO in Joomla, only in Wordpress, but you say "you'll be covered either way". Joomla needs a quite detailed list of plugins to become SEO-friendly.

As far as Drupal goes, the comment about it being a "Content Management Framework" is very accurate. Potentially it is more much powerful than either Joomla or Wordpress but the learning curve is correspondingly steeper. The Drupal guys recently got VC funding for using Drupal on larger enterprise sites. Its hard to imagine WP or Joomla going down the same path - they're more of an ordinary end-user tool. February 03, 2008

Reading this post closely I can see a lot of mistakes and technical inaccuracies.

1) You compare two forms of Joomla URLs. In fact they are both made with the same setting (default SEF URLs). The first URL, without default SEF URLs would look like this:

index.php?option=com_mtree....

2) You miss out any discussion of the other SEF URLs components available for Joomla (SEF Advance, Artio, Remosef, OpenSEF, Jpromoter) or even what it will actually make your URLs look like.

3) Duplicate content issues in Joomla are mainly based around the Itemids in the menu and also Section and Category pages. Switching off the PDFs will solve some problems, but the issues go much deeper.

4) Theres no need for a hack and the one you mention gives you very little control. Try one of the SEF URL components mentioned above or the SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com